There is nothingness in you, he said, that pullsme, partial vacuum. You are crushing me, she said. Accepting, taking: twined one zero threads in the shirt he takes off. A prow with a white marble victory figurehead, wings broken into the water, touched the other shore. Crushing marble to powder, coarse like marrow in a bone cut lengthwise and dried in the sun until there is a nothingness in you.
originally appeared in Narrative
65 The Paris-American
Theodore Zachary Cotler is the author of House with a Dark Sky Roof (Salt, 2011) and Sonnets to the Humans (Ahsanta, 2013), which won the Sawtooth Prize. In 2011, he received the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He's a founding editor of The Winter Anthology.